Possibly the showrunners felt that the folks watching at home would feel more positively toward the NCIS characters–who, as shown by their office equipment, are just Regular Joes, not fancy-pants rich guys like your boss who looks down his nose at you. (Or something like that.)
Voice a monotone: clearly, to disguise the fact that the producer was double-dipping by giving his wife the role (in addition to her other roles). If Majel could have done accents, the computer might have had an expressive voice–in a nice Irish brogue, perhaps.
The clacking: it was reassuring to audiences who were a bit uneasy about computers. Silent operation = ominous plotting by the evil mechanical intelligence!
Yeah, but then you’d have the phenomenon of a recently-deceased person being recognized, walking around. Whereas if it’s Paulo’s face on Bela’s body, someone might say 'you know that seven-foot man shambling about the countryside looks something like Paulo, but it can’t be Paulo seeing as he was barely five foot six…must be a cousin from another town or such…’
Did Majel do the voice in TOS? If she did, it was heavily altered electronically, whereas in the other series (Voyager in particular) it was clearly her real voice.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember what the computer sounded like in any of the other series exceptVoyager. That must be the only one in which I found it distinctive.
The Star Trek computer voice was just a dramaturgical/practical choice. Audiences of the 60s needed something more than silence to indicate that even an advanced computer was “working” and clicking relays, although rather ridiculous sounding now, worked perfectly at the time. Majel Barret’s voice wasn’t overly processed in TOS, she just performed it with a deliberate monotone to emphasize that the Enterprise’s computer system, while highly advanced and capable of both speech recognition & pronunciation, was *NOT *a sentient being, it was still just a machine and had no need for emotionality. They actually made fun of this in Tomorrow is Yesterday where the computer briefly had a sultry, sexy voice (much to Spock & Kirk’s dismay). Sentient machines were always villains on TOS (like Nomad and even more the Federation made M5). BTW, Barret is the only actor to be featured in every single incarnation of Star Trek, including The Animated Series and the 2009 reboot film (again as the computer voice).
But by the time TNG came about attitudes about technology had changed drastically so it was perfectly acceptable for Majel Barret’s computer voice, while still rather unemotional, to not be cold and robotic sounding. And of course for Data, a fully-fledged sentient android, to be a crew member.
As to why 2001’s HAL was different, well again he wasn’t just a computer, he was a fully sentient machine and an integral part of the overall plot & meaning of the film (and because Kubrick was an unqualified genius!)
Wiki says that she completed the voice over recordings before she died. I haven’t seen or read too much about the latest film (spoilers) so I don’t know if they somehow recycled material and/or computer generated her voice for it, or hired a sound-a-like, or just skipped over it entirely…
I’m always impressed with how people in movies can hang from a rope or railing or windowsill by one hand for several minutes. Next time you go by a playground, grab a horizontal bar with one hand, lift your feet off the ground, and see how long you can hang on.
And you didn’t even have to catch yourself after falling several feet, like most of the movie people did.
Even with both hands, if you’re over 30 and not a former gymnast, see how easily you can go from a dead hang to getting your center of mass over the top of the bar, which is always trivial in the movies.
It’s ingrained. I’m an EMT (been certified for 6 years), and I can tell you that it’s just natural. I’ve had people ask via the radio what my ETA is for a scene, and I can tell you that I can’t think of any time that I haven’t glanced at my watch or the clock in the squad. That’s not to say that I’m claiming that I look every time. Just that I think it’s a natural reaction to look at a clock/watch when a question like that is asked.
I can’t speak for any other EMT/paramedic, but I’d imagine they do it with stunning frequency, also.
Frankly, that seems like a strange complaint to me. I live in a big city and the time it is now influences how long I think a given trip will take and likewise, if someone asks me when I want to have lunch, if I’m starving and it’s 9, I will say 11. If I’m starving and it’s 10, I might go with 12.
My friend was a bar bouncer, and this is very much truth. My friend was a very fat, large black man who looked intimidating unless you knew him. He was the poster movie bouncer. They just want guys who LOOK scary, they don’t care too much if they could actually handle a fight. After all, Jackie Chan could probably kick your ass, but if he came over and told you to take it outside the first reaction is “… you and what army?” The ideal would probably be people like my other friend who’s like 6’2, 220 pounds of almost pure muscle, and done karate all their life, but those people usually have better things to do than be a bar bouncer.
Why do people meet at a cafe or restaurant, order food and/or drinks, then leave without consuming them - or worse (and quite often) leave before their order even arrives ?
Why would you built a self destruct capability in a spaceship, and have a point in the countdown where it becomes irrevocable? Okay, maybe you want to have a way to ensure that other crews won’t enter a ship and be overcome by hostile aliens or infected with parasites, but why make it so someone could be on a ship and unable to rescind a self destruct order?
Because it’s built to code. It’s clearly stated in the Mad Scientist’s Guide to Overthrowing the University, Page 19, Section 4, Line 6 (or Page 20, Section 5, Line 11 in the new revision), that: “In order to maintain a balance in the universe, your awesome and obviously superiors designs must have an easily detectable flaw, or where would be the challenge?” It’s also why Luke could blow up the Death Star.
Also, the actual physical process involved in self-destruction may reach a point of no return - for instance, the antimatter reactor may reach critical mass, but there will still be a few minutes before the containment fields fail and the ship explodes.
I could buy something like this, but they never go into this detail. It’s always an unemotional female computer voice saying something like “self destruct sequence cannot be terminated in… 15 seconds.” A plausible physical explanation would go a long way toward credibility.